This blog is about authoring tools. Mainly about the set of XMLauthoring, editing, and validation tools we use at developerWorks, and addressed mainly to our authors, but not just. We're interested in authoring technologies in different contexts, for different purposes. We'd like to create content here that responds to the needs of our authoring community, sometimes in quite specific, nerdy, tools-patch ways, but that also treats more general authoring topics, such as OpenDocument and XML, XSL, text processing, natural language processing, information development.

As you will know if you're a part of the developerWorks community, our processes, technologies and direction change continually (not to say abruptly!). The merely general and interesting may at any time become the practical. For example, developerWorks is experimenting with ebooks; this is a hobbyish technological interest of mine, also an authoring technology of sorts. It may well be that we'll find some good way to produce ebook versions of our content, and perhaps update our authoring tools to better support this new set of formats. We'll see. Just as an example.

Please feel absolutely free to comment here (for instance, by commenting on this first, introductory post), to share this content in your networks -- or even to be a co-author of this blog! (which is how I've set things up in anticipation). We will use this as the forum where we post specific information about the authoring tools we maintain (this thing's broken, here's a workaround, don't do this, &c), also where we'll solicit your input on those and other requests, questions, and so forth (new templates, what improvements you need, &c).